Strange Confessions: Oh, For the Days of The Cosby Show!

Strange Confessions: The worst time I remember about going to the breakroom is when they had put a television in there.

I said in my last Strange Confession that these people I worked with in retail had a lot of reasons for working there. I don’t think most of us wanted to be there, our life path just led us there; be it temporary or permanent. I enjoyed the company and genuinely liked all of them in one way or another. Except when a TV was installed in the breakroom.

You think that would be nice to be able to watch a little television while on your break, and sure sometimes it was. But for the most part people would put it on some stupid tabloid talk show. This was at the height of garbage tabloid tv. You had your Oprah, who was probably the least irritating, Maury Povich, Montel Williams, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Jenny Jones, and the worst of the worst Jerry Springer. I grind my teeth just thinking about these shows. Telling the people I work with that this represented the lowering of intelligence in this country, exploitative, disturbing, it made them believe that this was normal behavior in our society, hateful, spiteful, and just plain lazy, didn’t make a bit of difference to them, and they kept sucking it in, and absorbing it’s mindlessness, and sucking it in, and staring vacantly. I called for them to try to do something beneficial to their brain in their viewing. I tried to convince them that just because society may look down on retail workers as losers, doesn’t mean we have to act like the losers they think we are and watch witless swill on our down time.

Why, why, why did they have to choose that offal to consume along with their coke and cookies? Were they really just the people everyone thought they were? Or was it just that it was something easy smooth to turn of their minds to? Or was it that they realized that their lives were heading down paths they never saw coming, always in fear of crumbling around them, and these shows just showed them people’s lives who were a lot worse? Whatever the reason, I despised it, and gave anyone grief the whole time I was up there. I went on and on of the detriments of watching this rubbish. I know I irritated them, and maybe they started hating me for it, but I just couldn’t help myself.

I started leaving the store regularly during breaks and lunches. There wasn’t many other places to go; other stores or fast-food restaurants. You couldn’t visit other stores for very long because when you work retail you give off this aura of Doyouworkhereism, and people were always asking you if this came in blue. Fast-food restaurants took your hard earned money and made you fat and guilty. You could look at the magazines at your store, but inevitably they called you, and you heard it. Sitting down with a coke was the thing to do, and giving in to watching this drivel was tortuous. It got into your brain. In fact I still write like a doofus from these things invading my brain.

I can’t imagine what a breakroom tv today would be broadcasting and my reactions to it. I know I couldn’t take it for a whole 15 minutes. The deterioration of society is evident in television programming. To me there is a program that represents all that was wholesome and since its last broadcast nothing has been like it since. It was The Cosby Show. I have a saying whenever people start talking about television shows they watch and how horrible a lot of them are, I say, “Oh, for the days of The Cosby Show!” That show represented a time, at least for me, of innocence that quickly dwindled. Then, the show that started dragging things through the muck and mire was Friends. Sure, I might have watched it for a year or two, but I quickly realized that this represented the openness of pride in our immorality. Of course, this was also the time that I was becoming a Christian. Although that doesn’t degrade the fact that The Cosby Show was truly the last of its breed: innocent, funny, wholesome. Oh, for the days of The Cosby Show!